Encounter with the West: The English East India Company

Abstract

In the Late Eighteenth Century, the English East India Company inherited the fractured medical legacy of the Mughal empire. More than by the orientalist orientations or the anglicist urges of its mixed bag of officers, the Company was swept by the huge tide of change in post-Mughal society that had already begun to disembody medical knowledge from the clutches of the royal court, single-copy exclusive texts, the Persian language, the nobility, and elite family backgrounds. The shift from Persian to Arabic as the language of medical science and the disembodied and communitarian profile of medical knowledge that it generated were taken to their culmination by the Company.